Resilience: What is it?
“Caregivers report high levels of stress from two separate sources:
- Watching their loved one decline. Thirty-eight percent of individuals we surveyed reported that as their loved one declines, it causes high levels of stress. Dementia, especially Alzheimer’s disease, causes a long, slow deterioration of mental and physical capacity. Watching this is painful and dealing with grief as dementia caregivers can take an enormous toll.
- Juggling work and caregiving responsibilities. Thirty-eight percent of survey respondents also said that stress from juggling work and caregiving responsibilities is a heavy burden. Caregiving responsibilities can interrupt work on a daily basis, cause caregivers to miss work, or lead lost promotions and wages….
- [Caregiving Old Guy takes the liberty to insert a new source of stress: the COVID-19 pandemic]
Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, or toughness.” Being resilient means you can adapt to stress, adversity or trauma. Resiliency doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t experience difficulty or emotional stress. It means that a person can practice coping strategies that will make them more tolerant to these stressors…” Written by Amanda Lambert, a professional Care Manager, for the HomeAssistance.com website: [click for link]
OK, but can technology in the form of a phone or computer app really help? If you have access, various App Stores do have a few caregiver apps, and a few resilience apps, but what about this current whammy of worry with COVID-19?
Dr. A. Browning, a UW Medicine dean for wellness (who also works on resilience, and dementia prevention) sent out an email last week with this “scary” graphic:
Dr. Browning also cites some scarier (to me), more specific projections for our own state: https://www.hca.wa.gov/assets/program/covid-19-statewide-summary-forecast-of-bh-impacts-20200624.pdf
But then she writes: “While the trajectory of a typical behavioral response is sobering, the good news is that baseline resilience and acquired resilience coping skills during the crisis recovery can improve our response and the speed of returning to baseline. What can we do now to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19?
Focus on social connections even as we maintain physical distance.
Leverage resilience coping skills. Get outside! Move your body! Eat well! Sleep!
Normalize behavioral responses, validate emotions and destigmatize reactions.
Prepare for changes in school and childcare schedules and potential closures.
Know that the normal reaction to disasters is resilience.
Leverage relationships, foster positive emotions and stay anchored in your sense of purpose.” [Dr. Browning kindly gave me permission to share her email].
In the context of COVID-19, here are some resilience apps, recommended in an article from the US Defense Health Agency:
“Self-care means something different for everyone, and we want to help you in any way we can during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Provider Resilience Toolkit contains free, evidence-based digital health tools developed by psychologists specifically designed to promote self-care, including the following Defense Health Agency apps:
- Provider Resilience App offers self-assessments and stress reduction tools along with a dashboard to track your daily resilience rating. This app is foundational to ensure provider resilience (Available in the App Store)
- Virtual Hope Box contains personalized tools to help you with positive coping, through relaxation, distraction, and connecting to others in a time of need. (Available in the App Store and Google Play)
- Breathe2Relax teaches diaphragmatic breathing to de-escalate stress (Available in the App Store and Google Play)
- The Military Meditation Coach Podcast teaches relaxation exercises and tips that help providers keep their mental health on track (https://www.health.mil/podcasts)
Driven by our mission to serve our patients, we are used to giving our all, every day. It is hard to pull back – even temporarily – when circumstances demand so much of us, but we must. The only way we will get through this is to take care of ourselves and each other.” [Kelly Blasko, Ph.D., Defense Health Agency Connected Health branch.]
So our front line heroes, both civilian and military, acutely recognize the need for support, but these resilience things might help anybody!
Note that the timeline to “reconstruction” (in the population graphic, not saying that it’s always true for individuals) is > 12 months. So the psychological effects will linger awhile, but some apps and ideas try to help with stamina.
Now, for something different!
In Japan, there’s a mythical sea creature, said to bring good fortune and/or pandemics, transliterated into “Amabie” and the Japanese Health Ministry is using it for their CV19 posters :
CC4.0 from Wikimedia
